


A Balance of Power

by bramblePatch



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Alternians on Beforus, Beforan Society, Beforus, Dancestors - Freeform, Gen, Gratuitous Worldbuilding, honestly not a lot of fantroll in this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-06
Updated: 2014-01-06
Packaged: 2018-01-07 17:48:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1122653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bramblePatch/pseuds/bramblePatch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Beforan Sgrub players are returned home, each with their dancestor in tow. Can the Pyrope girls regain their bearings in time to prevent a messy political situation from spiraling out of conchtrol?</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Balance of Power

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Trombonesonmars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trombonesonmars/gifts).



Latula has an entire five minutes curled in the bottom of her somnolence nest, vaguely reflecting on what a whack-ass dream that had been, before her new hiveguest wakes up and it's driven home that it had, in fact, been a whack-ass actual real life and afterlife experience and not a dream at all.

There's a crash from the leisureblock, and three sweeps of Sgrub haven't been entirely without effect. Latula's up and out of her nest in a moment. She reaches for her strife specibus and finds it as empty as it had been before the game. Her hive, too, seems to be in exactly the state it had been before being torn away into an artificially-created pocket dimension. Although her gear seems to have been suddenly and totally reset and she's pretty sure she's actually _alive_ again - not that she's taking the time to do a full check right now - she also seems to be the same age, physically, as when she died, and her reflexes haven't changed. As she creeps down the hall she grips her skateboard in both hands, fingers tight around the trucks on one end, ready to use the length to bash whoever or whatever has invaded her hive as hard as necessary.

She's not entirely sure what to expect - one of her friends, maybe. Meenah can hardly get around without an entourage to announce her presence, and Mituna would have said something by now, and she's really not sure any of the others would drop by unannounced even if they were in the area, but it's possible. Some creeper, possibly - it's not an area that gets a lot of outside traffic, and she knows most of her neighbors pretty well, but you never know. On an outside possibility, some kind of wild fauna - if trolls don't often travel through here, animals of any size are even rarer, but hey. If some cholerbear or sabertoothed puma has wandered into the hivecluster and ended up in her hive, she'll probably get on the news. Assuming it doesn't eat her first.

Somehow, Latula has slipped back into the assumptions of her pre-Sgrub existence, which is probably why even with what she'd like to think of as her battle-honed reflexes, she stops and gapes as she comes into her own leisureblock and finds a sword cane's point in her face.

At the other end of the sword cane is a slightly younger troll girl with the same sharp face and conical horns, a girl who watches her with narrowed eyes and holds her head with a strange, lizard-like angle, lips slightly parted as if she's tasting her surroundings on the air.

There's a long moment. The two scions of the line of Libra study each other and then, almost in the same motion, Latula lowers her skateboard and Terezi sheathes her blade.

"So. Nice place you've got here," Terezi says, finally. "What the hell is going on?"

Latula figures she might as well come clean on her total lack of a clue. "I have no freaking idea."

 

Once they get past the initial surprise, Terezi is remarkably cooperative, although Latula suspects that her nutritionblock will never be the same again. There are, it seems, very few things that Terezi Pyrope will not eat if you pour acidic vinefruit puree sauce on them first - or so she claims, although for an exact genetic duplicate, Latula thinks the younger troll is awfully scrawny in comparison to herself.

It's not like she spent a lot of time recently asking after conditions on that asteroid, but she kind of suspects that they weren't as well-provisioned as Terezi would like her to think. A few centuries of ghosthood makes it hard to remember exactly how limited the alchemiters were in such things, but it seems to Latula that food was hard to reverse-engineer if you didn't have the codes for it in the first place.

Anyway, at the moment she's more concerned with frowning at her phone, which has just gone to Meenah's voice mail, again.

"No luck?" Terezi asks, around a mouthful of processed poultry paste nuggets.

Latula shakes her head. "Nada."

"And you couldn't get through to your Captor or the spidertroll, either," Terezi reiterates with a scowl. "You don't think we're the only ones who ended up back here, do you?"

"I don't see why _we_ would be," Latula sighs. "I mean, yeah, we're super rad and all, but why would the Mind players be the ones got spat out into a world that shouldn't even exist anymore? Light, Doom, that would make sense, maybe even Life - although I mostly thought Meenah might know because damn that girl can plot - but I didn't do this, your powers are recon-focused, and I don't see how Mind could do this in the first place."

"Plus you're dead."

"Plus I'm dead, yes."

Terezi chews thoughtfully for a moment. When she speaks up, she sounds a little hesitant. "If we can't get anyone with a half-way relevant _aspect_ and I can't get the right perspective..."

Latula buries her face in one hand. She can tell where Terezi is going with this, because she's been trying _not_ to come to the same conclusion for a while now. "You _do_ know who our Seer is, right?"

Terezi shrugs.

"The sooner we ask him, the sooner we can sort through the bullshit," Latula sighs, and dials in the appropriate number, half-hoping there won't be any answer here, either.

No such luck. It barely rings twice before there's the slight click of an answer, and then a familiar and not entirely welcome voice. "Vantas household, and while I don't wish to be unnecessarily inhospitable in such a way as might be invalidating to anyone, this is really not a good time. Which I say with full acknowledgment that for people with some forms of social anxiety, there is no good time for a phone call - this just happens to be..."

Latula holds the phone away from her ear for a moment. Terezi throws her an inquiring look, and she points at the phone and then makes yackity-yack motions with her free hand.

After twenty seconds or so, she tries again, and finds Kankri is no longer talking. Instead there's a noise like a scuffle on the other end, and then a similar but slightly younger and significantly harsher voice speaks into the phone. "This is the Pyrope dancestor, right? I think what this lungbladder of a dancestor of mine was trying to say was you ought to turn on the current events broadcast. Tell Terezi hi for me, and try not to talk over her too much. I've got actual incompetents to track down."

With that there's a click, and Latula looks blankly at her phone for a moment.

"Well?" Terezi prompts.

"I think that was... Karkat's you guys's mutant, right?" she says. "He seemed to think we ought to watch the news."

 

It doesn't take long to find the right news broadcast. Meenah's hive - the shore-side heiress’s quarters, not the private wiggler's den under water - is a familiar enough sight, although the angle of the circling aerial cameras is a little odd to one used to approaching it from ground level. A journalist's voice over explains the situation, although in less detail than Latula herself can infer, and from the way that Terezi is glaring at the screen, it seems the younger tealblood understands even better. "...again, we're being informed that a hostage situation has developed, involving a previously undocumented tyrian adolescent. The heiress's status or involvement is unknown at this point in time, but if I might remind you, it's been approximately two sweeps since the last major disappearance..."

"Oh, _shit_ ," Terezi gasps. "Looks like your crowd aren't the only ones to come back to life."

Latula's only half paying attention to either Terezi or the reporter, but she nods, eyes still glued to the TV. It's Terezi's next question that catches her full attention.

"How quickly can we get there?"

Latula stares blankly at her. "You want to walk _into_ that?"

"I don't know Feferi _real_ well, but we've been kind of vaguely friends for ages and I've never tried to assassinate her," Terezi points out. "That's more than we can say for almost anyone else who probably isn't having a huge breakdown of their own right now. Can we get in there or not?"

"It's... not too far," Latula replies. "I don't know. I generally have clearance because I'm enrolled in the Imperial socialization culling program -"

"The what now?"

"There's not a _whole_ lot of seadweller kids our age, and Meenah hates most of them. So her custodians kind of recruited a bunch of us to see if she was any better with warmbloods - it's how she ended up friends with most of us. Which means I've had clearance to go anywhere Meenah invites me since I was like four," Latula explains. "I have no idea whether that'll get us into the middle of what looks like an armed standoff, though!"

Terezi chews her lip for a moment, and then nods. "If Feferi's barricaded herself in, and the Imperials don't want to just carpetbomb the place, then they'll want someone who can get in to talk to her, right?" she says. "That's us. Well, me, anyway. And I don't think she'll fork you on principle."

It's a little alarming that her dancestor appears to be confident analyzing hostage negotiations from a distance. Latula would kind of like to put that down to Seer of Mind powers, but she kind of suspects that it's just Alternia. "As soon as you get involved, we kind of have to admit the twelve of you exist," she points out.

"I think Feferi's already blown that wide open," Terezi replies. "We might as well show that there's _some_ of us willing to play nice, right? Or the next one to get on the news is going to be, like, Eridan or... someone."

Latula's not exactly sure who "someone" refers to, but she's totally failed to avoid as many of Aranea's accounts of their dancestors as anyone else, and it's probably safe to assume that there are several among that group who could easily make all the Alternians look dangerously insane by association.

She's not _entirely_ sure that Terezi isn't one of them, but aside from consuming an entire bottle of ketchup in less than an hour, her dancestor seems pretty legit. She sighs. "Ok. But can we get you into something that doesn't make it look like you just escaped from a juvenile penal encampment, first?"

 

Before they're halfway across town, Latula is already vaguely regretting this.

For one thing, although Terezi had agreed to a change of clothes, she'd gotten awkward and fidgety about any outfit Latula suggested that didn't feature their sign prominently - Latula's just glad that the sign _is_ the same, or she's not at all sure that the younger troll would have been talked into ditching her painfully utilitarian jeans and T-shirt. As it is, the cargo pants and cropped hoodie they've found to fit her are a few sweeps out of date, but Latula's really not clear on how much time has passed here since she started Sgrub so it's possible that she looks equally out of place.

Besides the clothes issue, though, is the fact that Terezi has clearly never spent much time in heavily populated urban areas, has never encountered a fully-grown adult face-to-face - while older trolls are less common than children and adolescents in the crecheopolis, they aren't entirely absent, and every time they pass someone older than Latula it becomes necessary to practically drag the defensively posturing girl along down the street. When they finally board a shuttle bus that will take them toward the docks district, Terezi insists on sitting as near to the door as possible, and refuses to let herself be distracted from suspiciously regarding everyone else who boards or disembarks in the twenty minutes before Latula drags her off again, giving the middle-aged brownblood driving the bus an apologetic look.

When they finally make it to the part of the city where streets and hivestems give way to scattered private hives and tracts of beach parkland shot through with well-maintained paths, Latula pulls Terezi aside in the lea of someone's ivy-strewn ornamental wall. "Ok, look, unless the situation resolved itself in the last forty minutes - which I kind of doubt because it would probably involve a Peixes acting sensibly and I love Meenah dearly but let's face it, that ain't happening any time soon from her end of the equation, and yeah ok I don't know Feferi like at all but even if she's the stablest chicky ever hatched there's stable and then there's negotiating with cull specialists with Meenah screeching at you and quite possibly while under the impression that they want you dead - why are you looking at me like that?"

"Just wondering how long you could talk like that before respiratory debt kicked in and you passed out," Terezi replies. "Go on."

Latula sticks her tongue out at her dancestor before obliging. "Anyway. So. We should start running into someone official pretty soon. Don't freak out. They aren't going to shoot you unless they think you're seriously threatening their lives or something, but I can't promise that if you flip out at them you won't end up tranqued and shipped off to a correctional camp for ferals, especially since you haven't got any kind of documentation, and from what I hear those places can get really nasty. Like we aren't sure that that time Kurloz got sent to one for a perigee didn't actually cause a bunch of his problems kind of nasty. So let me do the talking, ok? I should be able to get us past them."

Terezi nods, after hesitating a bit longer than Latula likes. "Sure."

"You're sure?"

"Sure I'm sure."

Latula sighs. "Let's go, then."

Sure enough, as the Imperial hive and its halo of aerial video automata comes into view around the curve of a dune, they're stopped by a patrolling guard, a young man a little older and a little cooler-blooded than Latula. She grabs the younger Libra by the wrist in what she hopes is a discrete reminder of restraint, and turns her brightest smile on the cerulean-blooded youth.

He doesn't seem impressed. "You'll want to get back home, ladies," he says, sounding a little annoyed but also almost bored. Latula wonders how many curious kids he's had to see off since things went to shit and it showed up on the news. "It's not safe around here."

"But we're _so_ worried about my friend Meenah," Latula wheedles; she's pleased to see a moment of uncertainty from him at the name-drop, although he covers it quickly. She rummages briefly in her sylladex and comes up with her ID, the imperially-issued one that carries the note of her status as companion to the heiress, and shoves it in his face. "See? I'm, like, _officially_ her friend."

"Then I'm sure she wouldn't want you to put yourself in any danger, Miss Pyrope," he replies, pushing the id badge gently away.

"Aw, come on," Latula begins, but the guard cuts her off with a curt shake of his head.

"Sorry. You two will have to see yourselves off."

And then Terezi bursts into noisy tears, making Latula come pretty damn close to jumping out of her skin.

"We just want to help, mister! How can we sit at home when we know the heir to the empire is in trouble like this? What am I supposed to do, just sit around and bite my claws while I watch the news? Well I can't! Do you know why? Because I'm _blind_!"

There's a long, awkward moment of stunned silence; Latula wraps an arm around Terezi's shoulders and looks at the guard over the tops of her shades. "Can we, like, talk to your boss or something? Is it still Gemguard in charge around here? And maybe my friend can have a moment inside to collect herself?"

The guard, looking a good deal less sure of himself now, shrugs. "I guess."

 

The guard must really be inexperienced, or they're short-handed, Latula thinks; he leaves them alone in the little guardhouse on the edge of the imperial estate and goes to track down someone who actually knows what to do. This suits her purposes just fine. As soon as they're alone, she turns to Terezi, crossing her arms.

"Ok, Halfshell, I've spent way too much time in the same bubbles as Aranea and that girl is totally incapable of not bragging about shit, I know you're not blind anymore," she informs her dancestor.

Terezi grins; her tears may have been genuine enough to leave slightly teal traces on her cheeks, but they seem to have stopped as abruptly as they started. "Old habits die hard, I guess."

"Being blind is a habit?" Latula's not buying it.

"Guilt tripping people over me being blind is a habit," Terezi explains, a little distractedly, as she investigates the little guard post they've been left unsupervised access too. "Oh, sweet, someone forgot to lock down the computer."

"Really? Score," Latula replies, annoyance over the blindness facade evaporating. "There should be an intercom or vid screen or something that'll connect to the hive. Maybe we can get through to Meenah and Feferi."

A little experimentation and a moderately high, narrow view of the front entryway of Meenah's hive comes up and fills the screen; there must have been some kind of indication on the other end that the video link was open, because a troll quickly bobs into view; a seadweller girl with the same gently curved horns as Meenah, but with long, wild hair and clothing in brightly-colored layers. In one hand, she clutches a double-ended trident, and although Latula's no expert on such things, she thinks it looks like the real deal, a well-honed weapon intended to be used and not like Meenah's ludicrously ornate ceremonial forks. 

"I said I'm not finterested in negotiating while you've got a coddamn swat team camped out there!" she snaps, storming over toward the camera - presumably the display is in the same area. "Back off and then we'll see about talking."

"That's too bad," Terezi replies, leaning across the desk toward the camera on their end as Latula tries to squeeze in enough to see. "I was going to offer you half a bag of marshmallow-stuffed beetles in exchange for you not acting shithive maggots."

"Terezi?" Even with the crappy video quality, the surprise is clear on her face and in her voice. "What are you doing here?"

"Same as you, only with less hostage taking," Terezi says. "You haven't actually stabbed your dancestor, right?"

"Of course not!" Feferi says indignantly. " _She_ tried to stab _me_."

"I didn't try very _hard_ ," Meenah objects, coming into the frame. "You startled me. A' course I was gonna kind of fling a trident in your general direction. We're cool, now."

"I did not realize 'cool' meant 'barricaded inside someone's home, using them as a hostage against their own bodyguards!" Terezi declares.

"Welcome to Meenah Logic," Latula sighs.

"I heard that!" Meenah snaps.

"I figured you would," Latula says. "How you doing in there, Paycheck?"

"Oh, you know, trapped inside my own hive with my crazy dancestor who thinks someone's going to try to get us to fight to the death or something, same old same old," Meenah replies. 

("Hey!" Feferi objects.)

"Heh. At least you guys can stay put. Riding the bus was an adventure," Latula laughs.

(" _Hey_!" Terezi objects.)

"I think you've had quite enough adventure for now, Miss Pyrope," says a dry voice somewhere behind the Libras.

 

Terezi jumps; Latula simply turns slowly with a sinking feeling. Standing in the door of the guardroom is a tall, stately jadeblood adult - Chaperon Gemguard, head of the imperial heiress's security detail.

She continues, "If you cooperate, I will instruct my officers to escort you home. If you do not cooperate, you will be escorted somewhere else."

"Come on, we can _help_ ," Latula objects. "We already helped!"

"That remains to be seen," Gemguard replies. "For now you can help by getting out of the way and staying there."

"Out of the way of _what_?" Latula demands. She does not receive an answer, because that's when the still-running webcam behind her speaks up.

Or rather, Feferi speaks up via the web chat. "I want to talk to the Condesce. In person, if possible."

Latula throws a perplexed, slightly panicky glance at Terezi, as Gemguard asks, "Come again?"

"The empress," Terezi says quickly.

"Her Enlightened Compassion," Latula supplies. "She wants an audience with the Compassa. Which technically she's entitled to, imperial heiresses get to speak with the Compassa if they make the request through the right channels, which would be you, Chaperon."

"That girl is not the imperial heiress," Chaperon Gemguard replies stiffly.

"I bleed as pink as Meenah does!" Feferi objects. "Maybe pinker!"

"You do _not_ bleed pinker than I do," Meenah hisses.

"I _might_ ," Feferi insists. "Do you want to compare?"

"If I say I do want to codpare, does that mean I can stab you?" Meenah asks.

In the guard house, Terezi facepalms. "She might not be _the_ imperial heiress, but she is _an_ imperial heiress. And I'd really recommend you do something before those two manage to eliminate each other."

Gemguard stares hard at Terezi, who, apparently forgetting that she was pretending to be blind again, meets the steely jade gaze for a long moment. Finally Gemguard sighs, and looks over at the webcam. "I will see what I can do," she promises, and stalks out of the room.

"Oh, _hellz_ yeah!" Latula cheers, and grabs Terezi in a tight hug. "Nice going, Halfshell!"

Terezi grins, and makes a token attempt to peel her dancestor off of her before quickly giving up and just hanging onto the arms wrapped arnound her shoulders. "You did most of the work," she points out, and then looks over to where both Peixes girls are still gathered around their webcam. "I believe whatever the next part is, it's on you, Feferi."

Feferi nods, expression grave. "I know. I'll be ready. Don't worry, Terezi."

 

A few weeks later, in a meeting block in the Beforan high imperial palace, a girl of some six or seven sweeps paces. She is nervous in awaiting the Compassa's arrival, but she is also remarkably collected - or perhaps it's not as remarkable when we reflect that Feferi Peixes is imperial herself, a warrior-princess from a civilization that now, it seems, will never be.

She looks up as a door opens at the far end of the room, and a woman enters. Tall, elegant, dressed in a gown with a tight fuchsia bodice and layer upon layer of sheer, multicolored skirts. She has the same horns, the same broad facial fins, the same determined eyes as Feferi does. In the reality from which the young Feferi hails, a woman of such status and demeanor would be called Imperious. Here, it seems, she is Enlightened.

Feferi dips a deep, formal curtsy to the Compassa as she enters. Then she speaks.

"Your Enlightened Compassion, I would like to request asylum for myself and eleven of my friends."


End file.
